Hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) is a type of virtual computing platform that converges compute, networking, virtualization, and storage into a single software-defined architecture. For instance, a single software application can interact with each component of hardware and software as well as an underlying operating system. Hyper-converged infrastructures provide enterprises and other organizations with modular and expandable compute, storage, and network resources as well as system backup and recovery. In a hyper-converged infrastructure, compute, storage, and network resources are brought together using preconfigured and integrated hardware.
HCI can be deployed within a physical rack that contains one or more network switches, servers, and other hardware that facilitates communication between the servers and between the servers in the rack and external networks. When a rack is deployed, a dynamic host configuration protocol (DHCP) server or server process can be executed within one of the machines in the rack to assign internet protocol (IP) addresses to the other hardware in the rack as well as provide other configuration parameters, such as network boot parameters. A DHCP request that is received from a DHCP client can have various identifying information that a DHCP server processes in order to assign an IP address in the correct IP address range. The processing of the identifying information can require computational resources of the DHCP server and also delay the response time for a DHCP client.